Canadians are inundated with ads from Enbridge, Cenovus, Kinder Morgan, Shell and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

But we’re also targeted by a more insidious type of PR brought into the spotlight by the New York Times scoop on a speech Richard Berman gave to the Western Energy Alliance.

In that speech, Berman told the group’s members — mostly oil and gas companies — they had to be prepared to "win ugly" in an "endless war" against environmentalists. 

We are now finding out we are also subjected to secretly funded propaganda from groups like the “Environmental Policy Alliance” (whose self-conciously chosen initials are EPA, the same as the U.S. government’s Environment Protection Agency), or the more obviously biased “Big Green Radicals.”

Let’s take publicity-averse oil and gas players like the Koch brothers, for example. They are one of the largest leaseholders in the oilsands, and major contributors to Canada's Fraser Institute. Their combined net worth of $85.4 billion is greater than that of Bill Gates. And they are no doubt secretly spending untold sums of money influencing elections throughout North America, lobbying against environmental groups and attempting to ridicule or “diminish [progessives'] moral authority.”

Loaded Messages and Commercial Warfare

Propaganda, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, is “an organized program of publicity, selected information, etc., used to propagate a doctrine, practice, etc.”

It is regarded as misleading and dishonest. It often presents facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. Propaganda can be used as a form of ideological or commercial warfare.

Enter Vivian Krause, the “researcher” who has spent years attacking Canada’s environmental groups.

Looking at a July 2014 Alberta Oil article penned by Krause, one can’t help but note how she delicately skirts around issues like the value of intact ecosystems and their useful services. She also ignores anthropogenic global warming and instead funnels the entire support system for Canada’s environmental advocacy groups down into her favoured conspiracy theory: the plan to destroy Canada’s fossil fuel industry to protect U.S. interests.

To do this, Krause needs some serious blinders on. For example, she describes a strategy paper called “Designed to Win: Philanthropy’s Role in the Fight Against Global Warming.” The phrase “global warming” is right there in front of her, in black and white, but she skips around it and zooms in on a pejorative view of the “education campaigns” to shift investment into large-scale renewable energy — as if going from fossil fuels to renewables was just some random, self-serving business decision.

She makes no mention of the concerns of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the American Association for the Advancement of Science or the World Bank (does she see them all as a soft, self-serving and self-indulgent elite?), all of whom think that global climate change is a really big issue, and all of whom have far more credibility than Krause.

Krause writes disparagingly of the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity, an organization created in 1987 by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Over the years, it has morphed into a focal point for philanthropic foundations that want to help make a better world. The stated vision of the organization is: “A sustainable, just and healthy future for all life on Earth, advanced by a vibrant and effective philanthropic sector.”

These high-minded goals are of no interest to Krause. All she cares about is that some of the $440 million handed out all over the world by the 64 charitable foundations that compose this organization has gone to Canadian environmental groups and First Nations communities, and some of that portion of their donations has been used to advocate against expansion of fossil fuel extraction, processing and transport.

But the real monstrosity of her claim is highlighted by a look at the bigger picture in which Krause’s critique is placed. 

Adding up all the money that has been spent by American charitable foundations on environmental issues in Canada in the last 15 years — that appears to be the timeframe of Krause’ analysis — the entire sum, from the numbers scattered here and there in her article, is about $500 million.

That may seem like a very large sum of money at first glance, but put in context it’s not. First of all, this is spread across dozens of organizations and across a decade and a half, making the annual grants to any single organization modest.

Secondly, dwarfing these sums is the vast fiscal colossus of the fossil fuel industry itself. While berating environmental groups and their funders, Krause makes no mention of the astonishing wealth taken in and spent by the oil and gas industry on a constant, relentless basis, day in and day out.

In the year 2013, the players in the oil and gas industry who are connected just to the oilsands — let’s call them “the Bitumen Boys” — earned the following astronomical sums:

What is obvious in this table is that the in-and-out totals of the Bitumen Boys, and the profits delivered to shareholders, as well as the total revenue stream, dwarf anything received from philanthropy by several orders of magnitude. Of the 22 companies listed, most profited more in one year, by many multiples, than their non-profit counterparts gained in 15 years.

In fact, the total profits of these 22 Bitumen Boys in one fiscal year — $142.7 billion — is 284 times the entire sum of money given to all environmental groups mentioned by Krause over 15 fiscal years.

Put another way, all the money given to environmental groups over 15 years was 0.35 per cent of the net annual profits of the companies developing the oilsands.

Yet Krause finishes her Alberta Oil article by saying: “For the fossil fuel industries, the battle with environmental activists is no longer David versus Goliath.”

It’s misleading and dishonest and she’s got to know that isn’t the case. Propaganda anyone?

Overlooking Oil Industry Spending

We don’t know the exact amount of money Enbridge is spending on its ad campaigns, because the cost for this public relations blitz is buried in generalized headings like “operating and administrative” or similar non-specific designations.

Krause never mentions oil company expenditures. Couple it with the plethora of opaque front groups like Ethical Oil that play by the Richard Berman playbook, and it’s clear that only the industry's inner circle can find out who pays for what.

Krause casts a blind eye toward oil industry spending, as well as the biological and climatological science that motivates many philanthropic foundations and non-profit groups to take action. She also adamantly skirts mention of the massive profits that motivate the fossil fuel industry.

If Krause wants to opine that global climate change, widespread pollution, population growth, species loss and over-exploitation of biological resources are minor issues, then she and I (along with most other Canadians) part company.

I’m throwing my lot in with the IPCC, with ecological economists like UBC’s Bill Rees, with my colleague John O’Connor whose direct field observations as a physician raise serious concerns about oilsands development, with the economists who are taking climate change seriously and with the public relations industry that has ruled out working with climate deniers.

The question is: who’s left to throw their lot in with Krause?

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

He had no idea he was being taped.

So when influential Washington, DC, political consultant Richard Berman talked about strategy and tactics to the oil and gas industry’s Western Energy Alliance in Colorado Springs this past June, he didn’t mince words.  

“This is an endless war,” Berman said.

The secret tape was published in the New York Times a few weeks ago, released by a displeased oil industry executive, on condition of anonymity.

As he urged industry reps to employ tactics like digging up embarrassing tidbits about environmentalists and liberal celebrities, Berman also made one emphatic point:

“People always ask me one question all the time, ‘How do I know that I won't be found out as a supporter of what you're doing?’ We run all of this stuff through non-profit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors. There is total anonymity. People don't know who supports us. We've been doing this for 20-something years in this regard.”

The Western Energy Alliance, at whose June meeting Berman laid out his cold-blooded strategy, describes membership as “an investment in the future of the independent oil and gas community in the West.” Its members throughout the U.S. and Canada “share and support our commitment to improve business conditions, expand opportunities and move the industry forward.” 

The only government member of the 480-member Western Energy Alliance is the Canadian Consulate.

Deliberately Misleading the Public

What was Berman, chief executive of Berman & Company, doing talking to the Western Energy Alliance? He was there to raise $3 million from energy executives to pay for an advertising and PR campaign named “Big Green Radicals.”

Berman boasts of having more than 25 “non-profit” front groups that launder money from industry players of all sorts, including the fossil fuel sector, with no way for citizens to find out about this clandestine funding.

“I am religious about not allowing company names to ever get used … And I don't want companies to ever admit that because it does give the other side a way to diminish our message.”

Major corporations secretly financing such a campaign should not worry about offending the general public because “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” he said.

That strategy sounds familiar back in Canada.

Here’s a deliberately misleading statement that would seem to come straight out of Berman’s manual: “For the fossil fuel industries, the battle with environmental activists is no longer David versus Goliath.”

But this wasn’t a statement from Berman — no, this is the final sentence of an article by Vancouver "researcher" Vivian Krause, who came out of the woodwork in the fall of 2009 when she first started writing a blog called Fair Questions, taking aim at the David Suzuki Foundation’s work on farmed salmon and the support it received from U.S. charitable foundations.

Fun fact: Krause is a nutritionist who worked doing PR for the farmed salmon industry. But it didn’t take long for her so-called “fair questions” to extend to many other environmental issues and organizations.

Instead of searching for a fair answer, Krause settled upon a conspiracy theory. It was to be a story she told over and over again — and it goes like this:

The corporate sector is beleaguered by rich environmental groups bolstered by money from U.S. charitable foundations with a hidden, self-interested agenda — not to do good in the world, or protect the environment, but to attack Canadian competition.

Krause wrote that U.S. foundations were funding work to “demarket” Canadian oil, so the U.S. can control the market. She attacked one of British Columbia's greatest conservation achievements, The Great Bear Rainforest agreement, as part of this conspiracy, calling the forest, "The Great Trade Barrier."

She pursued this theory with blinders on — ignoring all other money in the debate, ignoring all rational explanations for U.S. foundations funding work in Canada and ignoring organizations like Ethical Oil and British Columbians for Prosperity that tout Krause’s arguments but don’t disclose their own sources of funding.

Krause’s work is largely responsible for providing the federal government the ammunition it needed to earmark $13 million for the Canada Revenue Agency to conduct audits of charities’ “political activities.” Diverting the attention of environmental groups to decrease their effectiveness is another strategy out of Big Oil’s dirty PR playbook — as indicated in the Edelman documents outlining a strategy to do just that in the TransCanada Energy East pipeline debate.

Krause has maintained she’s working out of her North Vancouver basement apartment, driven by a sense of injustice to right a wrong. No one was paying her. In fact, she was living on her savings. It seemed an implausible story given the time she put into the work.  

Eventually, Vancouver businessperson and civic advocate Sandy Garossino managed to get Krause to admit on Twitter that more than 90 per cent of her income from 2012 onward has come from resource sector speaking fees.

But this hasn’t stopped her message being picked up verbatim by those who agree with it.

In July 2014, Krause’s work was published in the fossil fuel industry magazine, Alberta Oil, an updated version of the same-old-same-old story.

Her message — now also Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s message — is reinforced by other contributors in the issue of Alberta Oil. There’s Ezra Levant, the abrasive Sun Media host, and author of "Ethical Oil" who asserts: “Some organizations are on the payroll, like the Council of Canadians, that took $1.6 million from U.S. foundations to fight against fracking.”

The editor of Alberta Oil, Sebastian Gault, tells readers that Krause “uncovered an international sponsored scheme [he just about said “conspiracy,” didn’t he?] to stall energy development.”

He adds: “We now have a better understanding of the rise of Big Green and its influence over pseudo-grassroots organizations working against the resource sector.”

"Big Green?" Guess where that term comes from? Straight from Rick Berman, who vowed to wage a campaign he would call “Big Green Radicals."  

Embarrass them publicly, ridicule them, don't worry about playing fair or being honest, the goal is simple: win. That is Berman's message and Krause’s years of attacks on Canadian environmental groups seem to play from his book.

—

Editor’s Note:

We know that upon publishing this article, angry tweets and messages in the form of personal attacks will be aimed at damaging the credibility of DeSmog Canada. 

We know this will happen because this is what Krause and her followers do again and again, straight from the Berman script. This makes many journalists wary of challenging what Krause says and particularly intimidates those she directly attacks.

But DeSmog Canada exists to cut through the spin clouding the debate on important national issues such as natural resource development, the economy and democracy — and we wouldn’t be doing our job if we shied away from this topic. 

Next up: Digging Deeper into Vivian Krause's Disingenuous Anti-Environment Witch Hunt

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.